For those of you who followed me as mayor and would like to continue to follow my blog, thank you. To those of you who no longer wish to hear from me now that I’m no longer mayor, thanks for reading over the years; please unsubscribe if you wish. It’s been an enormous privilege to…
With so many candidates running and so many vacancies on Council, I’ve been asked many times over the last month for “my list” – who will I be supporting in the upcoming election. Having completed our final Council meeting last night, I now feel free to make my endorsements. I thought about all the ways…
WARNING: This post contains details some readers may find distressing. When I stood up in the canoe on July 1st in Victoria’s inner harbour to ask permission of the Lekwungen speaking people to come ashore, I was participating in a tradition that is thousands of years old. As we got closer to protocol corner at…
This piece was originally printed in the Times Colonist. Not everyone wants to raise a family in a downtown condo. And, with the cost of single-family dwellings hitting an all-time high, too many families in Victoria can’t afford a $1.4 million starter home. The “missing middle” fills the gap between these two scenarios. Missing middle…
At a public hearing on Thursday evening, speaking in favour of Victoria’s proposal to allow affordable housing and co-ops to be built more quickly, Irene from Vic West said when she thinks about the character of her neighbourhood, its the people in her neighbourhood thinks of. Irene wasn’t alone. She and others talked about the…
In 2017, the City of Victoria declared a year of reconciliation, adopted the five municipal calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and began a journey of reconciliation with the Songhees and the Esquimalt Nations on whose homelands Victoria was built. We realized quite quickly that a “year” of reconciliation was a naive…
Pulchérie Mboussi, Executive Director of the African Arts & Culture Community Contribution Society – Issamba Centre. Systemic racism exists. It exists in policing. In local, provincial, and federal government programs and services. It exists in health care and education. Systemic racism is rooted in the historical acts of colonization, displacement, slavery — acts which were…
This is the final part in a four-part series to make as strong a case as possible for Missing Middle Housing in all neighbourhoods in Victoria. This initiative is key to the city’s future. In a nutshell, Missing Middle Housing will allow for more inclusive housing forms “as of right”, which means without needing to…
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